The Fifty-Year Mission

Edward Gross

My three sons’ most passionate involvement with Star Trek has been the Abramsverse film efforts, so I found it particularly interesting when my middle son, Dennis, and I were watching 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. As William Shatner’s Kirk offered commentary on what the adventure we’d just watched was all about, Dennis turned to me with a thoughtful expression on his face and mused, “Star Trek’s supposed to be about something, isn’t it?”

If I’d had any Romulan ale in the house, I’d have offered the lad a toast.

Of course, when I first discovered Star Trek sometime during its 1966–69 run, I wasn’t really aware that it was supposed to be about something either. After all, I was somewhere between the ages of six and nine, and my greatest memories of those days were “playing” Star Trek with my friends. John Garry was Captain Kirk, Raymond Ciccolella was Spock, and I was “Bones” McCoy, armed with a toy binocular case as my tricorder and a Tiger water gun as a phaser. Together, we secured Brooklyn, New York, in general and Schenectady Avenue in particular for the Federation!

Flash-forward to January 1972 and New York City’s Statler Hilton Hotel. The first Star Trek convention, and I was there. Not that I have many clear memories of that day, beyond the fact that there was a long line of people waiting for … something. My eleven-year-old self looked up at a nearby adult and asked what the line was for. When he replied, “Gene Roddenberry’s autograph,” and I said, “Who’s Gene Roddenberry?,” he just shook his head sadly and offered, “You’re on the wrong line, kid.”

Maybe. But I’d eventually find my way.

Throughout the seventies, as I watched Star Trek five nights a week at six on New York’s WPIX, my love for the show grew to the point of near obsession. It was during this time that I, too, came to realize that Star Trek was about something; that the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had a life to it that seemed to transcend ordinary television and sparked my imagination, making me conscious of true character interaction and giving me new personal heroes to add to a pantheon that included Superman, James Bond, and Caesar (not Julius, but the chimp from the original Planet of the Apes films).

Reruns, additional conventions, novels, and poster books devoted to the show, gleaning any information on possible revivals in the pages of Starlog magazine, excitement over Star Trek: Phase II (the series that was never to be), and anticipation for Star Trek: The Motion Picture made up much of that decade for me. I remember on the morning of December 7, 1979, that the entire newspaper staff of Suffolk County Community College joined me on a trip to Sunrise Mall in Nassau County and the only multiplex on Long Island, New York, showing a morning performance of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. We watched the film and then headed back to the newspaper office, where I pounded out a review, giving it three and a half stars and proclaiming in the headline, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Worth the Wait!” I headed back to theatres on December 8 to be transported to the twenty-third century once again and wondered where the film I’d seen the day before had gone. Obviously I’d gotten caught in some sort of transporter malfunction involving the space-time continuum.

I still remember the press screening, in the first week of June 1982, of the sequel, The Wrath of Khan. We watched the trailer that played on a loop at an outside kiosk at the Manhattan theatre and couldn’t believe how incredible it looked. A few hours later it was obvious that this film had lived up to its hype. Star Trek was back!

A year later, my career in entertainment journalism began as I sold a story on the James Bond film Octopussy to Daredevils magazine and received my first-ever payment for writing: fifteen dollars! In 1985, I began writing for Starlog magazine, for which—among many other subjects—I interviewed a wide-ranging number of writers and directors from the original Star Trek, discovering in years to come that I had probably covered that show more than just about anyone else.

As time went on, my love for Trek dovetailed perfectly with my journalistic ambitions, resulting in a number of career highlights:

• Endlessly fascinated by Phase II and the Star Trek that could have been but wasn’t, I began researching that proposed show, conducting many interviews and piecing together the story that had never been told.

• Sitting with Leonard Nimoy—the man from Vulcan himself—in his New York Paramount office in November 1986 to discuss Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. My twenty-six-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend how it was possible that I could actually have been sitting there talking to him.

• A year after the 1987 launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I found myself in California and uncovering the true behind-the-scenes story of the tumultuous start-up period for that show, meeting with the likes of the late Herb Wright, David Gerrold, and Dorothy Fontana, and obtaining a wide variety of resource material—much of the results of which are being revealed for the first time in the pages of Volume Two of this book

• Becoming the Star Trek “go-to” guy for magazines like Cinescape, SFX, and SciFiNow, interviewing cast and crew of the various series and films.

• Meeting William Shatner and Patrick Stewart at the Generations junket, and having Patrick Stewart remember me two years later when I was on the set of First Contact. And in terms of the latter, being shocked when director Jonathan Frakes started referring to Sir Patrick as Butt-Head—until I saw the Beavis and Butt-Head T-shirt the good captain was wearing.

• With the arrival of Deep Space Nine—the only one of the spin-off series that came this close to rivaling the original in my heart—connecting with the various producers who, each year, took the time to discuss that season’s episodes with me.

• Visiting the set of Voyager and sitting down to chat with Captain Janeway’s real-life alter ego, Kate Mulgrew, and, in one of her first interviews after being signed to the show as Seven of Nine, Jeri Ryan.

• Being among the first to interview the entire cast of Enterprise to preview the last Star Trek series to date.

• Continuing my tradition of Star Trek coverage by interviewing J. J. Abrams, Chris Pine, and various cast and crew members making the 2009 and 2013 rebooted universe, Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, for Movie Magic and SciFiNow magazines.

In between all of this, I became aware of Mark A. Altman through his own magazine, Galactic Journal, and his in-depth coverage of Star Trek: The Next Generation in Cinefantastique. After giving him a call, we instantly connected and established a professional and personal friendship that’s lasted for nearly three decades, no doubt fueled by our mutual love for Star Trek, James Bond, and Wiseguy (and if you don’t know what that is, go stream it as soon as you’re finished with this book!).

In the years since, a number of things changed, among them the diminishing of interest in Star Trek as a whole, many believing that it was at least partially due to oversaturation between television series and feature films. Then there was the rise of the Internet, which in turn played havoc with the publishing industry, the belief being that anything people would want on a particular pop-culture subject, they could find online.

We disagree.

For starters, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary, Star Trek is very much back, the success of the Abrams films serving as a reminder to the media and the public of what Star Trek was all about, reinvigorating the franchise—particularly the original series—in the process.

And as far as the Internet is concerned, you simply cannot get everything online that you could get from a book. Especially this book.

When Mark and I agreed to collaborate on The Fifty-Year Mission, we believed that, given our decades of research, and the hundreds of new interviews we would be conducting, we could tell the real history of Star Trek in a way that no one else would be able to. That we could take this thing that has meant so much to us for almost our entire lives—and to millions of people around the world—and serve as its caretakers, crafting a telling of its history unlike any that has been presented before.

The writing of The Fifty-Year Mission has been a genuine labor of love. Our way of giving something back to a universe that has given us so much, and promises to do so for the rest of our lives.

Edward Gross

August 2015